1. Field of the Invention
Various aspects of the present invention relate to providing mechanical support and electrical interfaces to a remote control that controls delivery of multimedia information to a multimedia display system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A remote control device is used to control settings and display on an entertainment system from a remote location. The remote control device typically has a set of predefined buttons. A user receives visual information from a screen of the entertainment system, makes a choice and presses the buttons to realize the choice. Operating a remote control device may be inconvenient, for example, because a user generally looks back and forth between the remote buttons and the screen to complete a task.
The remote control device generally sends a control signal to the entertainment system using infrared or RF transmission. The entertainment system may typically be a television system, a home theater, a personal computer, a DVD player with a screen, etc. The remote control device needs a line-of-sight path between it and the entertainment system in case of infrared transmission. For RF transmission, the line-of-sight path is not necessary. In both cases the range of transmission is restricted to only few meters.
The user holding the remote control device may control the entertainment system from a location where the entertainment system is not visible by sending the control signal via the RF transmission. However this also ensures that the user cannot visually interact with the screen of the entertainment system. The user might not see video displayed on the screen of the entertainment system and hear audio played in a speaker of the entertainment system.
The remote control device runs on a battery. It might not be possible to put particular functionality into the remote control device keeping in view power consumed by the particular functionality. For example, specific functionality that consumes a large amount of power might not be integrated into the Remote control device.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with various aspects of the present invention.